Lady Wu wrote:It would be a pity if the site is down for good. I really do value having an online, searchable text. I wonder if there's anything we could do to save the text/notes... (*pokes James*)

I have the entire text backed up and stored in a database. I've actually done some pretty cool things with it. If this continues I'll just put that content online. Its origin is from a copy of Brewtt-Taylor's translation which probably won't be protected by any copyrights, though there's a lot of gray area involved. The comments, unfortunately, I don't have, would be difficult to recover (perhaps especially so now), and I wouldn't have legal grounding to republish them (though I imagine the actual comment authors wouldn't mind if that were the case).

Over a year ago there was another period of ThreeKingdoms.com outage and around that time I decided to put this together. I mostly used it as a research aid for the Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia and some related projects which I've never put online. I've always been a little bummed that nothing is really done at the ThreeKingdoms.com website when there are some pretty cool things which could be done with the novel.

In this online edition a program automatically locates and color-codes officer names, and links them to the Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia. This is still a rather beta technology as I've only fully processed about forty chapters or so of content, so some bigger errors may still exist. Still, in its current form it is a pretty good aid for browsing the novel.

I cleaned up a few bugs today and added some code to make sure it isn't indexed by Google.

But have at it, and enjoy.

P.S. You'll probably notice the fun colors behind the chapter links. That color is determined by taking every single character appearance in a chapter, correlating them to their corresponding colors in the encyclopedia (e.g. Shu = green), and then blending them all together. It is a fun little way to see at a glance what the focus of some chapters are. For example, Wu-heavy chapters are red in tone. The whole Liu Bei/Meng Huo saga is a yellow-green (from combining the yellow of Shu officers and the brown of Meng Huo's group).

Over a year ago there was another period of ThreeKingdoms.com outage and around that time I decided to put this together. I mostly used it as a research aid for the Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia and some related projects which I've never put online. I've always been a little bummed that nothing is really done at the ThreeKingdoms.com website when there are some pretty cool things which could be done with the novel.

In this online edition a program automatically locates and color-codes officer names, and links them to the Three Kingdoms Encyclopedia. This is still a rather beta technology as I've only fully processed about forty chapters or so of content, so some bigger errors may still exist. Still, in its current form it is a pretty good aid for browsing the novel.

I cleaned up a few bugs today and added some code to make sure it isn't indexed by Google.

But have at it, and enjoy.

P.S. You'll probably notice the fun colors behind the chapter links. That color is determined by taking every single character appearance in a chapter, correlating them to their corresponding colors in the encyclopedia (e.g. Shu = green), and then blending them all together. It is a fun little way to see at a glance what the focus of some chapters are. For example, Wu-heavy chapters are red in tone. The whole Liu Bei/Meng Huo saga is a yellow-green (from combining the yellow of Shu officers and the brown of Meng Huo's group).

Aygor wrote:AAAAAAAAA THAT'S SO AWESOME!!!! Why is there no link to this page in kongmin.net homepage?

Glad you like it! To answer your question, mostly for the reasons I mentioned earlier in the quote above. I originally started it and updated it through a few long-term threekingdoms.com downtime stretches. The only real reason why I haven't launched it is out of consideration for threekingdoms.com, which is clearly designed to generate some income. If I launched it, and it became popular (and I suspect it would given that I wouldn't try to generate money through advertising and I would also add features and focus on a clean layout) it would take away from them. It is pretty cool that they've gone through all that trouble to launch and maintain that website.

On the other hand, I'm torn. There are so many fantastic ideas I have for this little project (including many which aren't apparent at all in what you see through the link above). And at this point I think it's pretty safe to say that threekingdoms.com won't really be updating or adding features to their website. It is also somewhat incomplete at this time anyway. I still need to address some encyclopedia links and the navigation could use some improvement.

So for now I've made it available for anyone who cares to dig enough. I don't mind if people use it and share it one bit. I just haven't decided yet about completing it and launching it on Kongming's Archives.

Damn, James, you're a nicer person than I'd be under the circumstances. This site is an amazingly helpful resource for reading RoTK, and honestly I'd already have shown it off just to bask in the praise already. I'd certainly love to see what other ideas and features you'd like to add to this. : o

Aygor wrote:AAAAAAAAA THAT'S SO AWESOME!!!! Why is there no link to this page in kongmin.net homepage?

Glad you like it! To answer your question, mostly for the reasons I mentioned earlier in the quote above. I originally started it and updated it through a few long-term threekingdoms.com downtime stretches. The only real reason why I haven't launched it is out of consideration for threekingdoms.com, which is clearly designed to generate some income. If I launched it, and it became popular (and I suspect it would given that I wouldn't try to generate money through advertising and I would also add features and focus on a clean layout) it would take away from them. It is pretty cool that they've gone through all that trouble to launch and maintain that website.

On the other hand, I'm torn. There are so many fantastic ideas I have for this little project (including many which aren't apparent at all in what you see through the link above). And at this point I think it's pretty safe to say that threekingdoms.com won't really be updating or adding features to their website. It is also somewhat incomplete at this time anyway. I still need to address some encyclopedia links and the navigation could use some improvement.

So for now I've made it available for anyone who cares to dig enough. I don't mind if people use it and share it one bit. I just haven't decided yet about completing it and launching it on Kongming's Archives.

How thoughtful of you, i can see your point. Still what you did is wonderful, and the changing colour of the chapter links is a brilliant touch.